parlando

henry threadgill, "spotted dick is pudding" (1988)

Posted on February 24th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.

Song Project #13

I am unqualified to write about jazz or classical music, even more than I am unqualified to write about pop music. I am an uneducated enthusiast. I don't play an instrument, and can't speak of the technical details of music in any but the most vague and general terms. I can, of course, speak of the effect of music on me, but that's what most music writing does, and most of it is bad -- and the harder it tries, the worse it is. So tackling this at all is intimidating to me. But I love jazz (and classical, though that is outside the purview of the Song Project), and I have to try. I have no idea whether my approach is coherent. I hope that I improve as I learn to articulate why I like what I like.

Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about Henry Threadgill. I try not to express my tastes in music objectively, even the positive opinions that are unlikely to offend anyone, but in Threadgill's case I abandon all pretense of subjectivity. Henry Threadgill is the greatest figure in post-1970 jazz. He ought to be famous. That he is obscure, even among people with a fair knowledge of the history of jazz, is a testament not to a decline of jazz itself but to its decline in importance in American culture. He is the third in my personal triumvirate of jazz: Ellington, Mingus, Threadgill. They represent (to me) jazz that is compositional, complex, adventurous but melodic, the middle ground between the tradition and the avant garde. Each of them explore a wide range of styles, yet each of them has an unmistakable individual voice. When I unexpectedly hear music by them I don't know, I recognize the voice in an instant. In Threadgill's case, this can happen even when the music he's playing is not his own; I heard a piece from Hal Willner's Weird Nightmare Mingus tribute on the radio, and knew immediately that it had to be Threadgill.

Threadgill emerged from Chicago's avant garde scene in the 1970s; his best known work in that decade was leading the free-jazz trio Air (not the French pop electronica outfit). I like that stuff okay, but it's a bit loose and shaggy for my taste. He came into his own with his Sextet (or Sextett), which was actually a septet; I gather that he variously explained that the Sextet was the members who were not him, or that the two drummers constituted one instrument. The band was always Threadgill (saxophones and flute), two horns, two drummers, bass and cello (except on the first album, on which the cello was a piccolo bass). Their first three albums were on the tiny About Time label; the two great ones (When Was That? [1982] and Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket [1983]) were finally issued on cd a few years ago. He was then signed to RCA's Novus imprint, and recorded three albums, the first two (again) of which are great: You Know the Number [1987] and Easily Slip into Another World [1988]. BMG has allowed the albums to languish out of print for so long that Allmusic doesn't even have a picture for You Know the Number. It is (goddamnit) appalling that these albums are out of print. They are, or ought to be, touchstones for where jazz has been for the last thirty years. At any rate, "Spotted Dick Is Pudding" is the last track on side one of Easily Slip into Another World.

This is "Spotted Dick Is Pudding".

This song is like bursts of joy for me. From the beginning, it reminds me of the best parts of being in New Orleans jazz clubs -- or rather, since I loved this before I ever went to New Orleans, the joyful music I was lucky enough to find in New Orleans reminded me of this. I can scarcely point to all the moments of pleasure. A few that make me grin crazily: Frank Lacy's trombone jumping in with a huge growl at 1:33, Threadgill's solo beginning at 4:21, but especially the quick tootles at 4:51 ending with high bleats and the screams at 5:00, and the beautiful run of notes down and back up at 5:24. The alternating low and high bleats at 5:46, while the band stomps away behind him, Deidre Murray making long appreciative whoooaaaaa notes with her cello, makes me laugh out loud. I love the backing horns and bass going into double time at 6:10.

There is a musical theme that runs through the entire piece, but the band does so much more than comp over a set of changes. After the statement of the theme, trumpeter Rasul Siddik takes the lead at 0:30, but he doesn't really solo; he plays the theme, while the band varies behind him. Listen to what each of the other instruments is doing behind him for the next minute, sometimes chiming in for big climactic notes, sometimes spreading out into weird harmonies, while the melody remains straightforward (albeit through key changes).

Even once Lacy and Threadgill begin soloing away from the main melody (while the melody can always be heard in their soloing by implication), you can listen to the rest of the band this way. There is no turn-waiting; everyone is coloring every part of the song. I think Deidre Murray on cello and Fred Hopkins on bass are one of the most amazing combos in jazz history -- they led a few hard-to-find albums on their own -- and listening to them here is like a song in itself; yet it fits perfectly. The drums, too -- Pheeroan akLaff and Reggie Nicholson -- relentlessly play the rhythm while decorating the edges. They never do that tiresome cymbal-bashing that seems to be the default timekeeping for so many jazz drummers, nor do they ever leave the song without a solid rhythm. Through the double-time section they get further out; as they move toward the 6:50 point they are playing wildly around the rhythm, but it's still there in the interstices; they never leave the song unanchored. The drummers only get really unleashed at the end, starting at about 8:23, and by themselves for only about ten seconds, then pushing the song to its triumphant ascendant unison through the horns' climactic outburst, topped by Threadgill's exuberant final blast.

Every second of this piece is exciting to me. I never tire of the melody, the variations on it, the passion with which it's played by Threadgill and Lacy and Siddik. Everyone else is supportive but not merely so; you can follow any instrument through the song with interest. All of Threadgill's best compositions, like Mingus's, are assembled from fascinating pieces that somehow meld into something greater; I often can't hear how the pieces can logically fit together, but they do. In fact, this is truer on many other Threadgill pieces than it is here; the shape of this piece is inferable from most of the bits, while many of Threadgill's other pieces sound like they couldn't be rebuilt if somehow the pieces were to lose each other and need to be reassembled.

Which is to say, I confess that not all Threadgill sounds like this; this is his most accessible period, and possibly his most accessible song. I didn't choose it for that reason -- it is my favorite Threadgill song -- but those inclined to investigate further will find his subsequent work, with the Very Very Circus (in which the deep end is held down by two tubas) and beyond, to be thornier, less obviously melodic. But, I hasten to add, not irrationally or unmusically so; most of Threadgill's music has a logic unlike anyone else's, is all. And this is how much his music means to me: if I can introduce one person who ends up loving his music, I will consider the whole Song Project justified.

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